I more often than not work from a model, often the same model as it happens, and I work in the way that I might have done when I was in my first year in art college. You know she’ll get her kit off, and I’ll get out a bit of paper, and we’ll have a good go. And it’ll be frustrating at times, but [in using language] I’m not thwarted by the clumsiness of working with materials—I personally have much more dexterity with language. It’s natural to me.

But it must be an intrusive experience for the model?

It is for both of us, really. I suppose [the nudes] are all self-portraits anyway, in some sense. But somebody getting naked in front of you is as much a responsibility for the person who is being a voyeur as it is for the person who is supplying the subject. It does set up a tense and interesting scenario.

Your new nudes are on these almost anatomical parts of fighter jets. They seem to merge that voyeurism of the nudes with your fascination with war imagery.

The layers of voyeurism in the nude are echoed in the way we look at war and deal with images of war. When I first started making those pieces, I wanted to get hold of some of these [fighter jet tailfins] just because I wanted to see what it was like to have them. It took me an awful long time to be able to get hold of any of these objects, because, importantly for me, they still have a currency.

I ended up having to accrue a little dossier of letters from the Ministry of Defense saying, “I know she looks like a terrorist, but…” Penetrating this incredibly male military world was also quite weird. I hadn’t anticipated that there would be this very strange reaction to some bird coming in and going, “How much?”

I suppose there’s something [in the nudes on the tail-fins of Harrier Jets] about the vulnerability and fragility that one feels up against this kind of military gear and how it operates in the world. It’s the ultimate hardness—in absolute contradiction to our ultimate softness. I’m also very interested in that idea of this military hardware being the new nature. For example, take the nicknames [for the jets], which I’ve been collecting alongside the images of them: They refer to all-powerful nature: Cheetahs, tornados, etc. And of course, these things are often called birds in movies.

That brings us back to the films: You deliberately pick films that are almost impossible to capture in words, because they’re so expansive in their scope….

Lawrence of Arabia is a film that defines the notion of epic, spatially and historically. I was interested in the idea of being able to contain that kind of epic notion, to make language wrap around that and somehow stretch towards it. It’s the same thing that really fascinates me about painting: the heroic frame. The fact that [a painting] can contain all this [visual information] that the eye cannot see all at once. There’s this slightly absurd and wry reference to that in my work.

Even just the extent of the writing, the fact of tracing the duration of time, has this defunct heroism to it. With the still-films, there was an attempt to describe this entire event or this entire image, whereas my newer work is more “live,” if you like, because the descriptions are more unmediated.

I’m also equally fascinated by what language can and can’t do. A lot of my work is about how we communicate and how we don’t. Of all of my work, the full-stop series [life-size sculptures based on periods from different font types] is most overtly and absurdly about a breakdown in language, which most of us experience at various times.

When I started making those sculptures, I was experiencing a complete disenfranchisement from the way I make work. My thought was how I could make something to represent this dumbness—dumbness in terms of stupidity, but also in the inability to communicate, and this gap of how to proceed from that.

The full-stop sculptures are sort of the reverse of your films. They turn text into an object, rather than the other way around…

They’re like the text work turned inside out. I started by making drawings of full-stops, which I though of as completely edited texts—these sort of black voids. But I realized that all these full-stops are different forms. It was interesting how this void that is just about a pause [on a page] actually has a whole character.